Father and Son: a study of two temperaments eBook

Marks was accustomed, while putting me to bed, to
dwell darkly on the incidents of her past, which had,
I fear, been an afflicted one. I believe I do
her rather limited intelligence no injury when I say
that it was prepared to swallow, at one mouthful,
whatever my Father presented to it, so delighted was
its way-worn possessor to find herself in a comfortable,
or, at least, an independent position. She soon
bowed, if there was indeed any resistance from the
first, very contentedly in the House of Rimmon, learning
to repeat, with marked fluency, the customary formulas
and shibboleths. On my own religious development
she had no great influence. Any such guttering
theological rushlight as Miss Marks might dutifully
exhibit faded for me in the blaze of my Father’s
glaring beacon-lamp of faith.

Hardly was Miss Marks settled in the family, than
my Father left us on an expedition about which my
curiosity was exercised, but not until later, satisfied.
He had gone, as we afterwards found, to South Devon,
to a point on the coast which he had known of old.
Here he had hired a horse, and had ridden about until
he saw a spot he liked, where a villa was being built
on speculation. Nothing equals the courage of
these recluse men; my Father got off his horse, and
tied it to the gate, and then he went in and bought
the house on a ninety-nine years’ lease.
I need hardly say that he had made the matter a subject
of the most earnest prayer, and had entreated the
Lord for guidance. When he felt attracted to
this particular villa, he did not doubt that he was
directed to it in answer to his supplication, and
he wasted no time in further balancing or inquiring.
On my eighth birthday, with bag and baggage complete,
we all made the toilful journey down into Devonshire,
and I was a town-child no longer.

CHAPTER V

A NEW element now entered into my life, a fresh rival
arose to compete for me with my Father’s dogmatic
theology. This rival was the Sea. When Wordsworth
was a little child, the presence of the mountains
and the clouds lighted up his spirit with gleams that
were like the flashing of a shield. He has described,
in the marvellous pages of the ‘Prelude’,
the impact of nature upon the infant soul, but he
has described it vaguely and faintly, with some ’infirmity
of love for days disowned by memory’,—­I
think because he was brought up in the midst of spectacular
beauty, and could name no moment, mark no ‘here’
or ‘now’, when the wonder broke upon him.
It was at the age of twice five summers, he thought,
that he began to hold unconscious intercourse with
nature, ‘drinking in a pure organic pleasure’
from the floating mists and winding waters. Perhaps,
in his anxiety to be truthful, and in the absence
of any record, he put the date of this conscious rapture
too late rather than too early. Certainly my
own impregnation with the obscurely-defined but keenly-felt
loveliness of the open sea dates from the first week
of my ninth year.